Sunday, August 6, 2017

A Good Try, Failed

It was a noble effort to be sure and a pretty good plan (all things considered) for as long as it lasted. Sadly, that wasn’t terribly long at all. We’re talking about the effort by some Baltimore community leaders to enact a 72 hour “ceasefire” in the city. John noted the kickoff of the effort on Friday, while I’d described my own concerns about the prospects for success a couple of weeks earlier. It was an effort that was labeled nobody kill anybody weekend, and it was supposed to run from Friday morning until Sunday night.

A 24-year-old man was shot and killed in Baltimore on Saturday, police said, breaking a 72-hour “ceasefire” called by activists who had pleaded for a pause in the city’s record homicide rate.
Community leaders organized around the social media hashtag Baltimore Ceasefire issued a general plea that “no one kills anyone” during the 72 hours of Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
After no homicides were reported on Friday, the fatal shooting occurred shortly after 5 p.m. (2100 GMT) on Saturday, police said in a statement.
“The victim was rushed to an area hospital by friends,” police said, but he was pronounced dead at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

As I said previously, it was a gallant and worthwhile effort. At this point somebody had to try something, and it might as well start with the community. And if we’re going to charitably count the “weekend” as beginning one minute past midnight Friday morning, the city managed to make it 41 hours without a murder. (There was another shooting earlier on Saturday but the victim survived.) As terrible as it may sound to say it aloud, that’s really not too shabby for Baltimore. We’re now 216 days into 2017 and the body count in the city is just slightly less than that number, averaging roughly one murder per day. If they’d managed to make it seven more hours that would have been two straight days.

Okay, that’s not really a good statistic by any definition, but it’s better than nothing.

41 hours is well within statistical fluctuations if the underlying rate is one per day, and the murders are independent (an assumption that's probably not 100% accurate).